Arguing until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy

By Michael E. Woods

As the sectional crisis gripped the United States, the rancor increasingly spread to the halls of Congress. Preston Brooks's frenzied assault on Charles Sumner was perhaps the most notorious evidence of the dangerous divide between proslavery Democrats and the new antislavery Republican Party. But as disunion loomed, rifts within the majority Democratic Party were every bit as consequential. And nowhere was the fracture more apparent than in the raging debates between Illinois's Stephen Douglas and Mississippi's Jefferson Davis. As leaders of the Democrats' northern and southern factions before the Civil War, their passionate conflict of words and ideas has been overshadowed by their opposition to Abraham Lincoln. But here, weaving together biography and political history, Michael E. Woods restores Davis and Douglas's fatefully entwined lives and careers to the center of the Civil War era.

Operating on personal, partisan, and national levels, Woods traces the deep roots of Democrats' internal strife, with fault lines drawn around fundamental questions of property rights and majority rule. Neither belief in white supremacy nor expansionist zeal could reconcile Douglas and Davis's factions as their constituents formed their own lines in the proverbial soil of westward expansion. The first major reinterpretation of the Democratic Party's internal schism in more than a generation, Arguing until Doomsday shows how two leading antebellum politicians ultimately shattered their party and hastened the coming of the Civil War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Feb 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781469656403

Michael E. Woods

Michael E. Woods is associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee and director of the Papers of Andrew Jackson project.

Book preview

Arguing until Doomsday

CIVIL WAR AMERICA  

Peter S. Carmichael, Caroline E. Janney, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, EDITORS

This landmark series interprets broadly the history and culture of the Civil War era through the long nineteenth century and beyond. Drawing on diverse approaches and methods, the series publishes historical works that explore all aspects of the war, biographies of leading commanders, and tactical and campaign studies, along with select editions of primary sources. Together, these books shed new light on an era that remains central to our understanding of American and world history.

Arguing until Doomsday

Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy

Michael E. Woods

The University of North Carolina Press

CHAPEL HILL

This book was published with the assistance of the Anniversary Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2020 Michael E. Woods

All rights reserved

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The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Jacket illustrations: portraits of Stephen Douglas and Jefferson Davis by Julian Vannerson, photographer, 1859, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; (background) U.S. map by Rufus Blanchard, 1856, Library of Congress Geography and Map Division.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Woods, Michael E., author.

Title: Arguing until doomsday : Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the struggle for American democracy / Michael E. Woods.

Other titles: Civil War America (Series)

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2020. | Series: Civil War America | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019044427 | ISBN 9781469656397 (cloth) | ISBN 9781469656403 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Douglas, Stephen A. (Stephen Arnold), 1813–1861. | Davis, Jefferson, 1808–1889. | Democratic Party (U.S.)—History. | Slavery—History—19th century—Political aspects—United States. | United States—Politics and government—1845–1861. | United States—History—1783–1865.

Classification: LCC JK2316 .W74 2020 | DDC 973.7/11—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044427

This project is being presented with financial assistance from the West Virginia Humanities Council, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations do not necessarily represent those of the West Virginia Humanities Council or the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For Beth

Contents

Introduction

1. Western Men

2. Jackson Men

3. Manifest Destinies

4. Down to the Crossroads

5. Wages of Whiteness

6. Rule or Ruin

Epilogue. Countries over Party

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

Map of Louisiana and Mississippi from [Baird], View of the Valley of the Mississippi

Map of Illinois and Missouri from [Baird], View of the Valley of the Mississippi

Map of Iowa, Wisconsin, and northern Illinois

Prominent Candidates for the Democratic Nomination at Charleston, South Carolina, Harper’s Weekly

Arguing until Doomsday

Introduction

Alfred Iverson was sick of congressional gridlock. The Georgia senator had endured four years of divisive votes, bombastic speeches, and violent disturbances. Now, in February 1859, as two fellow Democrats bickered away a Wednesday afternoon, his patience ran out. Other senators had tried to gain the floor, but even when David Broderick of California succeeded on his sixth attempt, the combatants kept sparring. As winter twilight settled over the capital city, Iverson urged the presiding officer, Florida senator Stephen Mallory, to enforce the rule that limited senators to two comments per topic. Normally, said Iverson, he would cheerfully allow the loquacious senators to wrap up, but one of them had spoken at least six or eight times on this subject and his adversary nearly as much. If we permit these gentlemen to go on bandying arguments with each other, Iverson warned, we shall never come to the end of the question. … They can go on here arguing against each other from this until doomsday.¹

Iverson drew laughs, but the situation was deadly serious: Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi had spent three hours clashing over property rights, democracy, and the future of the American West. Their battle had erupted over a seemingly routine matter. The previous day, the Senate had taken up House Bill 711, an appropriations bill to fund the federal government through June 1860. Debate remained comfortingly dull until New Hampshire Republican John P. Hale proposed an amendment seeking repeal of an older provision to delay the Kansas Territory’s statehood until its population reached the minimum required for one congressional representative. Stunned, other senators demanded to know why Hale would broach this fraught subject with the session nearly over and much work still undone. But Hale’s amendment was relevant: H.B. 711 earmarked $20,000 for a territorial census. So, senators wrangled over Kansas for the rest of the day, proving only that no one knew how many people lived in the distant, bloodstained territory.²

The fireworks began Wednesday when the Senate returned to Hale’s amendment and dropped all pretense of discussing anything but slavery. Mississippi’s Albert Gallatin Brown opened with a blistering demand that Congress enact a federal slave code if territorial legislatures failed to safeguard slaveholders’ property rights. He swore that if the North, by mere force of numbers, denied slaveholders their rightful protection, then the Constitution is a failure, and the Union a despotism, and he would support secession.³

This was too much for Stephen Douglas. After glancing around the new Senate chamber, in use for little more than a month, and finding no fellow northern Democrat willing to respond, the Little Giant from Illinois raised his rotund, five-foot-four-inch frame to reply. He first sought common ground with Brown, agreeing that slaves were property and that citizens could carry property into the territories. But that was the end of their agreement. Brown wanted to give slaveholders special federal protection; Douglas demurred. Slaves were subject to local regulation like any other type of property, he insisted, and if masters needed federal help, it was their misfortune and none of his own. According to Douglas’s pet doctrine of popular sovereignty, property rights did not trump territorial self-government. After parrying counterattacks from Brown and Alabama’s Clement Clay, Douglas threw down the gauntlet: no slave code crusader could call himself a Democrat, for such an agenda violated the Democratic creed. Glancing ahead to next year’s presidential election, he added that no Democrat who favored proslavery federal intervention could win a single northern state.⁴

With that, Jefferson Davis plunged into the fray. Maintaining a stiff military bearing despite the neuralgic pain searing his face, Davis hurled back the threat of excommunication, wishing Douglas God-speed and a pleasant journey if he insisted on popular sovereignty. The Constitution, Davis insisted, did recognize slaves as a unique form of property. Congress, he proclaimed, was duty-bound to safeguard masters’ property rights in the territories. And if Democrats split over the status of a few Africans, Davis wanted it known that he condemned Douglas’s apostasy.⁵

Davis and Douglas fenced for hours. Against Douglas’s heresy of squatter sovereignty, Davis argued that not all property was created equal and that slaveholders required special public support. Douglas retorted that any property, from enslaved people to dry goods, could be barred from Kansas by local legislation. In the heat of battle, senatorial courtesy yielded to spite. Davis charged Douglas with catering to the prejudice of antislavery northerners. Douglas condemned Davis for denying hardy pioneers the great rights of self-government. At a time when congressional brawls had become distressingly routine, the threat of violence hung in the air: rumors of plots against Douglas’s life had swirled in January, and Davis had rushed at him in previous debates.⁶ This time, however, the senators exchanged nothing but verbal blows, and after several rounds of oratorical sparring, Iverson intervened, Broderick gained the floor, and doomsday drew nearer.⁷

Though less renowned than the great congressional debates of 1850 and less notorious than Preston Brooks’s 1856 caning of Charles Sumner, Davis and Douglas’s February 23, 1859, encounter illuminated forces that were fracturing the Democratic Party and destabilizing the Union. As leaders of sectional factions, Douglas spoke for northern Democrats when others remained mute, while Davis championed a hardline southern position on territorial policy. Loyal lieutenants rallied around them: Brown and Clay covered Davis’s flanks, while George Pugh of Ohio accused southern Democrats of betraying their northern brethren.⁸ Party unity was melting in the crucible of sectionalism. Davis and Douglas both detested Hale’s antislavery creed, but they did not combine against the Republican who provoked their quarrel. And while both longed to suppress the slavery issue, neither would yield any ground. When Douglas and Davis debated on center stage, other speakers and issues languished in the wings.

The action of February 23 distilled the Davis-Douglas rivalry into its toxic essence. The hair-trigger debaters battled to claim the Democratic mantle and define party doctrine. Transfixed by visions of western empire, they expounded upon constitutional law, historical precedent, party tradition, and national purpose, and their voices echoed across the continent. Mississippians monitored this Great Debate closely, with one ranking Davis among the great men of the age and gloating that the corrupt, revolutionary and dangerous Douglas had wholly alienat[ed] every true Southern man from him and his Squatter Sovereignty doctrines.⁹ Meanwhile, an Indianan likened Davis’s detestable doctrine to the Alien and Sedition Acts and vowed that it would never be engrafted into the Democratic creed.¹⁰ Seeking to give Douglas the last word, supporters circulated his remarks in pamphlet form.¹¹ Privately, one told Douglas that if southerners refused to relent, you must certainly drive them to the wall.¹²

Davis and Douglas’s rivalry crested on the eve of civil war, but its roots ran much deeper and its consequences changed the arc of American history. This book uses their parallel lives and intertwined careers to trace the long history of the Democratic Party’s collapse. They were born five years apart in the first two states created after the original thirteen: Douglas’s Vermont was admitted in 1791, Davis’s Kentucky in 1792. Both buried young wives and children in an age of rampant disease and perilous childbirth, and both remarried well-connected and politically savvy women. Both joined a surging tide of western migration and built their careers in Mississippi Valley states admitted in 1817 (Mississippi) and 1818 (Illinois). Benefiting from upward mobility through westward migration, both envisioned breathtaking future expansion. Both were stalwart Democrats, relentless campaigners, and hard-nosed legislators who sacrificed physical health for political success. They entered the House of Representatives in the mid-1840s, elected from Whiggish portions of reliably Democratic states, and ascended to the Senate in 1847. Both championed Manifest Destiny, cheering for Texas annexation and war with Mexico, and by the early 1850s both were prominent party leaders. Except for a period in which Davis left public office and then joined Franklin Pierce’s cabinet, both remained in the Senate until 1861, when Davis departed to preside over the Confederacy and Douglas, after rallying northern Democrats to the Union, went to an early grave.¹³

In the political history of the Civil War era, both men are understandably dwarfed by Abraham Lincoln. Studies pairing Lincoln with Davis and with Douglas are illuminating, but they can skew our perspective. Some Davis-Lincoln studies trace them back to their Kentucky origins, but most focus on the war years.¹⁴ Davis’s antebellum career, however, was not merely a prelude to his role as Confederate president. A formidable politician, Davis led a generation of Deep South Democrats who continued John C. Calhoun’s proslavery crusade after 1850.¹⁵ Davis figured prominently in the crisis of 1850, the presidential elections of 1852 and 1856, and mounting conflicts over slavery in the territories, American expansion, and the African slave trade. In the most creative chapter of his career, he wielded considerable power as secretary of war. The protracted intraparty struggle with Douglas underscores Davis’s antebellum significance. With Douglas in the picture, we can better understand Davis’s efforts to validate the Democratic Party’s proslavery credentials and force the party to redeem his promises. Davis’s quest to make his party and country safe for slavery tore them both apart.

This book also seeks to reinterpret, though not to vindicate, Stephen Douglas, the most polarizing antebellum Democrat. Now best known as Lincoln’s opponent in the 1858 Senate election, Douglas is easily cast as the foil whose racist demagoguery and southern connections accentuate Lincoln’s rugged decency and defiance of the Slave Power. Insightful studies of their storied debates remind us that Douglas, who was far more famous in the 1850s, was more than a speed bump on Lincoln’s road to greatness.¹⁶ Now it is time to reconsider Douglas from an entirely fresh perspective. The point is not to exalt Douglas by emancipating him from Lincoln, or to revive an antiquated narrative in which Douglas heroically resists antislavery extremism, but to reevaluate him as a national political figure. Interpreting Douglas through an intrastate rivalry can distort his career by placing him on a truncated political spectrum. Lincoln and Douglas were sharply opposed, but Illinois was not a microcosm of the country: without a Cotton Kingdom, the state lacked a cadre of planter-politicians, like Davis, who deemed slavery a positive good and sought to make its preservation a national priority. Only when contrasted with Davis can we understand why Douglas aroused so much loathing among southern Democrats. Only through a cross-sectional rivalry can we comprehend why some southerners called for secession, whether Lincoln or Douglas was elected in 1860. Only with a cotton state politico in the picture can we explain why Lincoln and Douglas joined forces against Davis’s southern republic. The Lincoln-Douglas rivalry ended in an amiable alliance; the Davis-Douglas rivalry spiraled into disunion and war.¹⁷

Davis, Douglas, and their contemporaries recognized the importance of this simmering struggle. Personally, the men despised each other, with special animus on the Mississippian’s side. Davis publicly threatened to hang Douglas alongside Lincoln and privately called him our little grog drinking, electioneering Demagogue.¹⁸ Varina Davis shared her husband’s disdain for the dirty speculator and party trickster from Illinois.¹⁹ But their rivalry captivated public attention because it was more than merely personal. Admirers saw both Democrats as leaders of factions warring for the party’s soul. An Ohioan (who named his daughter for Douglas’s wife) prayed that Douglas would triumph over the Jeff Davises of the South who sought to shackle the Democracy to a proslavery platform.²⁰ A Davis partisan denounced Douglas as an abolitionist in disguise and pressed Davis to show him no quarter.²¹

The rancor outlived the Little Giant and shaped Davis’s postwar campaign to mold public memory. Given the Civil War’s ferocious course and revolutionary consequences, he might logically have fixated on Lincoln. But when Davis, who had just weeks to live, wrote a final autobiographical sketch in 1889, he zeroed in on Douglas. Reflecting on his early Senate career, Davis recalled his active part in the debates on the Compromise measures of 1850, frequently opposing Senator Douglas, of Illinois, in his theory of squatter sovereignty. And when recounting the late antebellum years, Davis blamed Douglas for fracturing the Democratic Party and the Union. He mentioned Republicans and abolitionists only briefly, placing primary responsibility for the war on the Illinois Democrat, whom he still resented for having insisted upon the rights of the first immigrants into the territory to establish or prohibit slavery. From this sacrilege arose a dissension which finally divided the Democratic party, and caused its defeat in the Presidential election of 1860. Waxing poetic, he concluded, And from this empty, baseless theory grew the Iliad of our direst woes.²² Davis went to his grave cursing Douglas.

By weaving two remarkable lives into a study of their times, this book revisits antebellum America’s breathless optimism, restless expansionism, and self-destructive sectionalism. Thus, it offers both less and more than a traditional dual biography. By tracing Davis’s and Douglas’s connections to broad unofficial constituencies ranging from their home states across much of the West, it features a far more varied cast of characters. Many were active in office holding or electioneering; others, including soldiers, farmers, and merchants, offered valuable local intelligence. All shaped antebellum politics by influencing Davis’s and Douglas’s understanding of home-state developments and the burgeoning American West.²³ Equally important is what this approach reveals about how Davis and Douglas were perceived by their contemporaries. Both cultivated reputations as nationally minded statesmen who could unite a divided country behind the Democratic Party, but, by the late 1850s, both were widely regarded as champions of antagonistic sections. This grassroots perspective illuminates the popular pressure that shaped Davis’s and Douglas’s efforts to promote the Democracy back home.

The book culminates in the spring of 1861 with Douglas’s death and the outbreak of civil war and only briefly sketches Davis’s wartime activities, which have been ably covered elsewhere.²⁴ It does not chronicle every detail of Davis’s and Douglas’s lives. Rather, it foregrounds them in the narrative of a growing nation and an ascendant political party breaking apart. By contextualizing both men in their states and regions, the book uncovers the deepest sources of their motivations and ideals. It examines their beliefs, actions, and reputations to illuminate their growing influence as leaders of Democratic factions, which became increasingly sectionalized over time. Because the division and final rupture of the Democratic Party was an important prelude to secession, this approach follows two individuals down a path that led, although they willed otherwise, to disunion.

This approach yields three interlocking stories: personal, partisan, and national. As a collective political biography, this is the story of two men who moved west, planted roots near the Mississippi River, and visualized it as the heart of a sprawling empire.²⁵ Despite their shared party identity and racial prejudice, they developed distinctive visions for the future. Douglas imagined an extensive, decentralized empire of self-governing entities linked by material bonds of infrastructure and commerce. This web of flourishing white settler colonies would serve as an exemplar of republican self-rule while channeling trade toward Chicago and votes toward the Democratic Party. Davis, postbellum paeans to state sovereignty notwithstanding, pictured a tightly controlled empire in which a muscular central power protected masters’ property rights and extended the Cotton Kingdom’s reach to the Pacific. Douglas would make the hemisphere safe for white men’s self-government; Davis would make it safe for slavery.

Neither agenda appeals to most modern eyes, and at first glance they might appear compatible. In practice, they were not. By tracing Davis’s and Douglas’s efforts to maintain a nationally cohesive Democratic Party that could prevail in their home states, this book underscores the challenges inherent in American federalism. Historians have noted that antebellum sectional strife cannot be understood without attention to the interplay between state and national politics, a dynamic that appears clearly in Davis’s and Douglas’s careers.²⁶ Both men revered the Democracy as a vehicle for advancing their respective policy programs, but they had to prove to critics back in Illinois and Mississippi that the party was trustworthy. To this end, they pulled the Democracy in different, ultimately opposing directions. It was a risky game of tug-of-war. When the rope broke, the Democracy collapsed and the Union crumbled.

On the partisan level, then, this is a story of Democrats wrestling with thorny questions about property rights, democracy, race, slavery, and freedom. By focusing on relentless internal conflict, this book reinterprets the antebellum Democratic Party. Some historians cast the Democracy as an inherently proslavery force cemented by commitments to white supremacy and states’ rights.²⁷ They demonstrate the disturbing prevalence of racism and anti-abolitionism, but emphasizing Democratic solidarity leaves much about the party’s chronic intramural tensions, and even more about its 1860 rupture, unexplained. Some opponents may have felt beset by a monolithic Democratic foe, but intraparty strife, as Abraham Lincoln and other shrewd critics understood, was vitally important. Indeed, antislavery activists were not passive observers of Democratic infighting but actually exacerbated these conflicts by refusing to allow Democrats to dodge divisive questions about slavery. In turn, the party’s 1860 rupture marked a critical milestone on the road to secession: it sundered a national political party, prevented Democratic candidates from credibly claiming broad national appeal, and bolstered secessionists’ arguments that slavery was no longer secure in the Union.

A second group of historians have identified a vibrant antislavery element within the Democracy’s northern wing. Since many adherents became Republicans in the mid-1850s, however, these accounts often conclude several years before secession in 1861, precisely when simmering conflicts between northern and southern Democrats reached their boiling point.²⁸ This book thus shares most with a third body of scholarship on the Civil War–era Democratic Party, one that stresses internal diversity and disagreement, foregrounds northern Democrats who were neither embryonic Republicans nor proslavery doughfaces, and explores both what held Democrats together and what tore them apart.²⁹

Rather than try to pin down the Democracy as fundamentally proslavery or antislavery; inherently northern, southern, or western; or definitively progressive or reactionary, I view the party as a dynamic institution whose membership and ideals were constantly contested. Like most American political parties, the Democracy was an unwieldy coalition often sustained more by negative partisanship than by ideological uniformity. By outlining the party’s increasingly sectionalized internal conflicts, I trace how Davis and Douglas tore it to shreds. Centripetal forces like racism and party affinity failed to maintain cohesion in the face of conflicting material interests and ideological commitments, which were pulling the Democracy apart.

Specifically, a deep-rooted conflict between guardians of slaveholders’ property rights and champions of white men’s majority rule created an irrepressible conflict within the Democratic Party. Tensions between property rights and democracy are familiar to political historians in many fields: scholars of the Constitutional Convention and founding era have explored them in depth, and comparable work exists on the Jacksonian era, the Gilded Age, and the New Deal.³⁰ With some notable exceptions, however, students of antebellum sectionalism have not given questions of property rights and majoritarianism as much attention.³¹ This conflict lay at the heart of Davis’s and Douglas’s struggle to steer the Democracy according to the interests and demands of their constituents. Strident appeals to white supremacy or party fealty could not paper over basic questions about balancing slaveholders’ peculiarly fragile property rights with popular self-government. Like most Democrats, Davis and Douglas rejected abolitionists’ efforts to invalidate property rights in human beings. But as Matthew Mason has shown, antebellum sectionalism was not a binary struggle; opposition to one end of the political spectrum did not automatically align Davis and Douglas on the other.³² We know much about the conflict between Republicans and proslavery southerners. We know far less about the related but not identical conflict that split the Democratic Party and ensured that Lincoln and Douglas, for all their substantial disagreements, closed ranks against Davis when the shooting started in 1861.

Davis and Douglas’s rivalry was combustible because the Democratic Party’s oft-cited proslavery pillars—racism and states’ rights—did not adequately safeguard slavery in an increasingly hostile world. Both men recognized that slaveholders needed more than racist neighbors and a weak federal government to maintain control over enslaved people. Masters demanded active help from whites nationwide and from a central government empowered to advance their interests.³³ Building on this important reinterpretation of slaveholders’ politics, I argue that proslavery was a moving target, not a fixed position, and that as Davis and other southerners escalated their demands for public support, restive northern Democrats, led by Douglas, set clear limits on what they would accept. When protection of slaveholders’ property rights threatened white men’s vaunted self-rule, conflict among antebellum Democrats raged out of control.

On the national level, therefore, this is a story of irony and failure. Davis and Douglas cherished the Union, but their efforts to govern it ended disastrously. Most modern Americans are grateful that neither Davis nor Douglas triumphed; neither plays a heroic role in most narratives of Civil War causation. But their rivalry was serious and their experiences are instructive. By failing to distinguish between partisanship and patriotism, quietude and harmony, obstinacy and courage, Davis and Douglas inadvertently aided their common foe, the avowedly antislavery Republicans. For Douglas, this meant electoral defeat and the outbreak of a war he had insisted was avoidable. For Davis, it meant taking a revolutionary gamble to escape an existential threat. Yet Jefferson Davis and Stephen Douglas did not simply argue until doomsday overtook them. They were not characters in a tragedy; they were not voices of reason in an age of passion; they were not giants of a more heroic past. Nor were they part of a blundering generation, though they did live at a moment when generations of bullheadedness caught up to a country that had flouted its noblest ideals. Davis and Douglas were politicians determined to have it all—victory for self, party, section, and ideology. Pursuing these aims with all the energy they could muster, they hastened their own doom.

1

Western Men

There is a power in this nation greater than either the North or the South, proclaimed Senator Stephen Douglas, a growing, increasing, swelling power, that will be able to speak the law to this nation, and to execute the law as spoken. That power is the country known as the great West—the Valley of the Mississippi. Sprawling from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Appalachians to the Rockies, this heartland empire would save the Union from suicidal sectionalism.¹ Delivered in March 1850, Douglas’s prophecy was a timely one: Americans’ mental geographies were adjusting to the conquest of northern Mexico, and sectional strife was glowing white-hot. Skeptics might have warned that expansion would inflame, not dampen, sectional quarrels over slavery’s extension. Perhaps the West was the problem, not the solution. But Douglas had long since made western development the central theme of his career, and his swelling power speech transmuted his fondest desires into surefire guarantees.

Senator Jefferson Davis was a westerner, too. His Mississippi plantation was over a hundred miles west of Douglas’s Chicago home, and as a young army officer, Davis had forayed onto the Great Plains, farther west than Douglas ever traveled; more recently, his Mexican War service had burnished his credentials as an agent of Manifest Destiny. A year after Douglas’s speech, Davis self-identified as an inhabitant of the valley of the Mississippi and a western man.² But his regional affiliation was complicated. Davis’s admiration for John C. Calhoun, his calls for southern solidarity, and his vision of slavery’s unbridled expansion all suggested that the South came first. He dreamed of the West as a powerful appendage to his native region, not as an antidote to sectional strife. Yet hindsight should not obscure Davis’s western ties or elide his vision of a slaveholding sunbelt that stretched to the Pacific. Like his Illinois rival, Davis gazed westward with ambition, confidence, and passion born of personal experience and political aspiration. Both men enjoyed the upward mobility that white Americans associated with westward migration and saw the Mississippi Valley as the key to continental hegemony. As Democrats, Davis’s and Douglas’s western dreams drew them together and tore them apart. To understand their rivalry, we must situate both men in the dynamic river valley that they envisioned as the nucleus of a growing empire with enticingly imprecise borders.

This burgeoning domain was also riven by sectionalism. The monolithic West that Douglas imagined as the Union’s mainstay was, even in his youth, splintering into northwestern and southwestern sections. True, Illinois and Mississippi had much in common. Hugging the eastern bank of the grandest western river, they shared a colonial past (which included exploitation of slave labor), a rugged self-image, and economic dependence on the global trading hub of New Orleans. Their citizens’ commitment to commercial agriculture bred a voracious appetite for land, zeal for Indian removal, and esteem for Andrew Jackson. But Illinois and Mississippi began drifting apart even before they gained statehood in the nationalist afterglow of the War of 1812. Mississippi was maturing into the Cotton Kingdom’s richest province, while slavery died fitfully in Illinois amid an influx of free migrants from the Northeast and abroad. By the 1830s, the two states were linked by the valley of the Mississippi and the party of Jackson, but demographic, economic, and political changes were dividing them. These divergent societies bred two titans who never agreed on what it meant to be a westerner, a Democrat, or an American.

The Civil War cemented Davis’s image as a southerner, but Douglas’s association with the West is unshakable. Renowned by contemporaries as The Giant of the West, The Giant Intellect of the West, and the foremost of Western Democrats, Douglas’s western persona endured long after his death.³ But what did contemporaries mean by the West? Regional definitions are inherently unstable, but mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-American conceptions of the West centered on the Mississippi River. Even after U.S. sovereignty reached the Pacific, easterners imagined the West in terms of hydrological networks, with the Mississippi and its mighty tributaries veining one cohesive region. In 1860, Mississippi historian J. F. H. Claiborne eulogized the vast empire of the West, stretching along the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Mississippi, as the backbone of our Union and the citadel of our national strength.⁴ He imagined the West as both a geopolitical center and a region thankfully peripheral to North-South conflict. Connection with the Mississippi River was therefore a source of pride. Davis heartily identified with those who live on that great highway of the West—the Mississippi river, while Douglas boasted that we of the great Mississippi Valley constituted the heart and soul of the Nation and the continent.⁵

Contemporaries associated the West with material bounty as well as with national strength. The Mississippi River cut a deep channel into eastern imaginations during the flush times of the 1830s, when the valley’s booming economy attracted migrants and admirers. Many easterners encountered the region through the writings of publicists like Robert Baird. A Pennsylvanian who graduated from Princeton Seminary, Baird was an unlikely western promoter, but in 1832 he published a western guidebook whose title, View of the Valley of the Mississippi, or the Emigrant’s and Traveller’s Guide to the West, reinforced the identification of the river with the region. Writing roughly a year before Douglas reached Illinois and three years before Davis settled on his Mississippi plantation, Baird explained how to thrive on the frontier. Meticulous research into everything from transportation timetables to start-up costs informed his advice on where to go, how to travel, and what to plant. The Princetonian also dabbled in boosterism. Defining his subject as everything between the Alleghenies and the Rockies (which he called the Oregon mountains), Baird exulted that the Valley of the Mississippi encompassed 1.3 million square miles of incomparably bountiful real estate. The valley surpasses all others in the richness and variety of its soil. … In beauty and fertility it is the most perfect garden of nature; and by means of its thousand streams, wonderful facilities are extended to every part of it for commercial intercourse. Like many contemporaries, Baird thought in terms of transport, agriculture, and geopolitical power. Blessed on all three accounts, the Mississippi Valley would soon control the destiny of this nation, making the West an object of the deepest interest to every American patriot.⁶

Surveying the Mississippi from its headwaters to the Gulf, Baird appraised each adjacent state and territory from the perspective of a potential migrant, revealing that the valley was not a single economic or geographic unit. Take his implicit comparison between Illinois and Mississippi. After enumerating the Prairie State’s exceedingly productive (if stubbornly compact) soil, navigable rivers, and budding commercial capital of Chicago, Baird proclaimed that Illinois had the finest situation of all the western states. For those who could afford $1,080 in start-up costs, Illinois was ideal.⁷ Baird also attended to Mississippi but offered little specific advice. Instead, he warned of the sickly summer months and noted that cotton absorbs almost the whole attention of the locals, although they could raise corn, wheat, and cattle as well. Growing cotton, Baird conceded, is by no means a difficult operation, at least not for his presumably free readers, because the tedious harvest work was done by slaves, who go along with a basket, and gather all that they can pick out. Just a few enslaved laborers could run a paying plantation.⁸ The lessons were clear: Illinois was a healthy place, in every sense, for smallholders; Mississippi was a riskier proposition, but the owner of human chattels could prosper. Emigrants who shared Baird’s worldview would likely head northward. Baird tipped his hand when he calculated that the West contained enough land for four million farms of 160 acres each. A generation later, that magic number would taunt migrants whose dreams withered on arid western quarter-sections, but in 1832, it betrayed Baird’s affinity for northern family farming over southern plantation agriculture.⁹

Yet Baird recognized that not all migrants shared his perspective, and his analysis of migration patterns indicated that the West would succumb to sectionalism. Addressing easterners trying to imagine life in the Mississippi Valley, Baird noted that migrants tended to move directly from east to west: New Englanders to the Great Lakes, Virginians to Kentucky, and South Carolinians to Mississippi. Thus, western communities were arranged in a pattern familiar to denizens of the Atlantic Coast. If one knows what are the peculiarities of the several states east of the Allegheny Mountains, Baird explained, he may expect to find them … in the corresponding parallels in the West. This included the most peculiar peculiarity of all: Slavery keeps nearly within the same parallels.¹⁰ Years before Davis and Douglas established western homes, sectionalism was already perceptible in the West. Easterners might imagine the Mississippi Valley as a homogeneous frontier where pioneers subdued a wilderness with rifle and ax, but as the West developed into a hothouse of commercial agriculture, sectional divisions reappeared. Davis and Douglas inhabited very different Wests.

For all intents and purposes, Jefferson Davis was a Mississippian. His Kentucky birth, not far from Abraham Lincoln’s, makes for a satisfying coincidence, but it meant little to Davis’s life. Even his birth year is clouded by doubt; many scholars accept 1808, as recounted in an autobiographical sketch, but others favor 1807.¹¹ Either way, Kentucky made little impression on the infant. In 1810, his father, Samuel, relocated the family, first to Louisiana and then to Woodville, Wilkinson County, in Mississippi’s southwestern corner. There, Davis recalled a lifetime later, my memories begin.¹² His neighbors’ memories often began there, too. In 1859, a Vicksburg friend exulted over the political renown won by Davis, a native Mississippian.¹³ Davis noticed that the old people about Woodville very frequently have spoken of me as a native of that neighborhood.¹⁴ He relished this because he was a Mississippian by upbringing and by choice. After years away for school and military service, Davis elected to return to Mississippi to raise a family and pursue a political career. For a well-connected white male, it was a smart move. Contrary to the image of the Old South as a world frozen in amber, Davis’s Mississippi was a dynamic place. Not long before his birth, it was an isolated backwater, but a combination of gumption and avarice, cunning and brutality, and private enterprise and government coercion transformed it into one of the world’s richest cotton-growing regions.¹⁵ Davis rose with Mississippi to the pinnacle of power.

The Davises arrived just as Mississippi was poised for an economic boom. A generation earlier, while Georgia-born Samuel fought in the Revolutionary War, Anglo-American migrants trickled into the area, usually avoiding the Choctaw and Chickasaw communities to the north and gravitating toward Natchez, a Mississippi River town some forty miles north of Woodville. Established in 1716, Natchez passed between French, British, and Spanish overlords until Spain relinquished it to the United States in 1798. Colonial-era planters had exploited slave labor to grow tobacco and cotton in the Natchez District, but in the late eighteenth century, plantation agriculture was confined to a small area. Many early American arrivals lived very much like their counterparts in frontier Illinois, including the hardy souls who settled upriver in Warren County, Davis’s future home. Few owned slaves or large estates, and most lived rough, simple lives as subsistence farmers, raising hogs, planting gardens, cutting wood, hunting game, and trading locally. They toiled to get by, not to get ahead. By the turn of the nineteenth century, however, some had started exporting cattle through New Orleans, a foreign (Spanish and briefly French) city until 1803, and purchasing slaves as a source of extra household labor. Many locals persisted as subsistence farmers, but a growing number had accumulated capital, acquired enslaved workers, and ventured into plantation agriculture. By the time Samuel and his toddler son reached Mississippi, it was primed for an economic revolution.¹⁶

Map of Louisiana and Mississippi, from [Baird], View of the Valley of the Mississippi, 247. (Courtesy of Rare Book Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

When the takeoff arrived, it swept through Mississippi with the intensity of a gold rush. By the mid-1830s, Mississippi had become the Mecca of American fortune hunters whose dreams of quick riches anticipated California forty-niners or Texas oilmen.¹⁷ Migration swelled the population by 175 percent between 1830 and 1840, when the total reached 375,000.¹⁸ From every corner of the Union came young upstarts chasing material gain and professional advancement. When John A. Quitman, a wide-eyed New Yorker who later became Davis’s neighbor, arrived in 1822, he kicked himself for having dawdled in Ohio before pushing on to Natchez. No part of the United States holds out better prospects for a young lawyer than Mississippi, he reported. Money was plentiful and attracted the floating population of the whole West, bringing a mixture of sleaze and gentility, with blackguardism and depravity jostling alongside an elegant aristocracy. It meant brisk business for a hustling lawyer. With planters raking in $50,000 per year and 120 criminal indictments crowding the docket, Quitman liked his chances.¹⁹ These, recalled another writer, were the golden days of Mississippi.²⁰

The rush was fueled by cotton. Ravenous British demand, coupled with Mississippi’s long, hot growing season, created a bull market. In 1808, Natchez District planters exported around 5,000 bales of cotton, but output soared as cultivation spread across the state.²¹ By 1830, Mississippi yielded around 100,000 bales, and the flush times were just beginning. When Mississippi passed Georgia to become the South’s leading cotton producer in 1840, production exceeded 386,000 bales and reached 1.2 million twenty years later.²² The western river counties, including Warren County, led the way. When Davis settled there in 1835, Warren County’s soil was yielding some 30,000 bales per year, with its 32,000 bales in 1840 ranking second in Mississippi.²³ Notably, much of the state was beginning to resemble the older plantation zone of the southwest, as zealous planters acquired fresh land in the northern and eastern counties.²⁴ On the eve of the Civil War, small farmers predominated in the northeastern hills and southern piney woods, but much of Mississippi was cotton country. No longer confined to the Natchez District, King Cotton reigned statewide.

This economic explosion is often attributed to the cotton gin. Eli Whitney’s Yankee ingenuity provided an important spark, but Mississippi’s transformation depended on many factors. One was the use of new cotton varieties, including a Mexican strain, introduced around 1820, whose wide-open bolls were easier to pick.²⁵ Equally important was the state’s mighty namesake. The river carries huge quantities of silt, which is periodically deposited on the floodplain, nourishing Mississippi’s famously fertile riparian soils.²⁶ The river also linked Mississippi to the world. Towns like Natchez and Vicksburg existed to connect interior plantations to the river, which carried cotton down to New Orleans and on to global markets. The Louisiana Purchase, which secured U.S. control of the Crescent City, solidified the river’s status as Mississippi’s economic lifeline.²⁷ Traffic on this western highway multiplied after the advent of the steamboat, which quickened economic activity by providing two-way transportation and reducing shipping costs. Fewer than twenty steamboats operated on the Mississippi River in 1815, but more than two hundred plied its muddy waters in 1820, and over seven hundred by 1850.²⁸ Lacking a major seaport in their state, Mississippi planters relied on the river to keep King Cotton on its throne.

Jefferson Davis experienced this transportation revolution as a child. Samuel wanted his son to enjoy a better education than Mississippi offered, so in 1816 he enrolled him in St. Thomas College, a Dominican institution in Kentucky. Young Jefferson made the arduous outbound journey on a pony, accompanying an expedition led by War of 1812 hero Thomas Hinds and meeting Andrew Jackson along the way. Two years later, Davis cruised home to the recently admitted state of Mississippi aboard the Aetna, one of the earliest steamboats to ply the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. The voyage thrilled the ten-year-old, who never forgot the names of